Current Employee - Senior Member of Technical Staff in Boxborough, MA (US)

Current Employee - Senior Member of Technical Staff in Boxborough, MA (US)

I have been working at AMD full-time (more than 8 years)

Pros

Some teams have healthy cultures. Some technical work is cutting-edge. It's a friendly atmosphere. AMD is never too formal. Flex time is possible so long as you're delivering stuff. There's often good collaboration across teams / sites / functions. Not much red tape. Work/life balance is fine in my experience, 40 hours will usually do it on most teams.

Not a lot of crazy pie-in-the-sky research projects -- everyone's work is directly related to products. And we do ship a lot of products, they are in people's hands.

Cons

Some teams have unhealthy cultures: some are documentation-free, some are led by bullies. A few entire teams are deadwood. Some very senior bullshitters have built empires for themselves, and you don't want to cross them. Some parts of the company are an old-boy network, and some of the old boys don't hardly deserve their privilege.

AMD can be democratic in the worst way. We can't do something unless everyone agrees, but we have to keep talking about it if anyone wants to do it. So there are a lot of "efforts" where 25 people get called to a weekly meeting to discuss some vague future process improvement which never goes anywhere. To survive, you have to develop a good sense of which efforts are fictitious and ignore them or decline participation.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

To the management of the company that acquires us in the future: don't keep AMD intact. Refactor it. Sort the teams into "healthy", "needs more resources", and "needs to go".

AMD is full of great people to work with. They're smart, dedicated, and fun. The technology that they produce is top-notch. They have a lot of good safeguards in place so that engineering mistakes don't get through into products.

Cons

AMD always seems to be struggling to gain recognition from consumers and respect from PC manufacturers. This is reflected in their low market share. Gamers love the Radeon graphics cards, but that's a relatively small market. With PC sales declining, it's a race to see whether AMD can make up the sales by breaking into new markets.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Getting design flows to work reliably was always a challenge. The CAD group is understaffed and/or focusing on the wrong things.

If you are reasonably smart and hardworking (and manage to keep your job through reorgs), fairly good place from work-life balance perspective

Cons

* Management tries to exploit limited opportunities in Boston area in chip design, by not compensating people properly.* Misalignment in leveling across locations (especially management in Boston does not reward employees at same level as other locations)

Advice to ManagementAdvice

You have (or at least had till I worked there) very smart engineers. You owe them and the shareholders for all the mismanagement over the last 10 years. Show them a well thought out strategy and they will do great things for you.

The technology is very cool and the company is small enough that you can make a real difference. The fusion stuff where CPUs and GPUs work closely together is awesome.

Cons

The company can't seem to make money. Products are constantly canceled. Schedules constantly shift. Responsibilities and ownership for common stuff is often unclear. Lots of schedule chicken and passing the buck. Decisions often don't get made at all, or at best they are delayed until the last possible moment.

Salary is competitive.Work is interesting.They offer pretty decent benefits.They have sites in many locations.They use quality industry tools.Most of the technical people are very bright and seem to know what they're doing.

Cons

There's a culture for a cycle of constant layoffs and constant hiring. So even if you do your job, meet your deadlines, your head may still be on the chopping block. It's an atmosphere of fear where you are constantly worried if you're playing the political game well or not. If you're a quieter person, this place definitely advocates that the squeaky wheel gets the oil. As a new person, you're constantly worried if you spoke enough in meetings or if your work is a high enough quality. But in the end, that doesn't matter, and it just depends on whether Senior Management likes you or not.

Good if you want to design microprocessors and graphics processing units (cpus and gpus), cmos circuits and microprocessor architecture. Design teams are big and spread all over the world. A lot of teleconference meetings and possibly some travel involved.

Cons

Projects can be too long (3-5 years) which makes them prone to a higher level of uncertainty on their completion (market changes, technology changes, management changes, etc). You are expected to be able to log in from home or while on the road. People tend to put in long hours including and it is not uncommon to receive and send email 24/7. Design teams are all over the country and world therefore there is a need to have teleconference meetings at odd times which could be very early, very late, or during lunch time. Has very similar performance policies as Intel: top 10% employees get treated like kings, bottom 10% employees get laid off in the next cost cutting round, the other 80% get below expectation reviews during tough times and average reviews during good times.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

Management should be honest during performance reviews and not use them as "motivational tools". It is not fair on hard working employees and it takes a big toll on company morale.

Health benefits exceeded the industry standard. I never paid anything except a small co-pay, even for major surgery.

Absolutely amazing colleagues. Some of the brightest minds in the world work there.

Cons

What you’re hired at was about as good as it gets. The company would consistently hire very senior level people, at very competitive salaries, and then assign them a title that would limit their potential for receiving any significant form of raise. Most often the salary increases wouldn’t even cover increases in cost of living (not good for a long term career). Often when referring people into he company we would inform them to only accept a position if the company agreed to change the title to a higher level, thus forcing them to be hired at the bottom of the salary range with room for salary increases.

The Information Technology teams were re-organized SIX TIMES from the beginning of 2010 to the latter half of 2012. By the end the staff was “siloed” into groups based on very specific functions, and none of these groups communicated well. This made it impossible to complete any project. By the end of this time it was common to say “If you don’t like what you’re doing, just wait two months”.

If you are not located in Austin, TX then you will often get overlooked (referred to internally as “Good ole Boy Syndrome”)

There is a major lack of focus from upper management (Director up), and middle management is horribly overworked (promotion to management was considered a death sentence).